floppy media failure

Jules Richardson pondered: ... engage brain before posting :) I was thinking of lashing something up so that the upper head wasn't in contact with the disk at all, reading the bottom surface, and only then reading the top. Thinking about it some more, the loading of the head against the surface on both sides is almost certainly critical, so this wouldn't work :( Billy wrote: The dual sided floppies offset the top head from the bottom to create a tension path for the media. This kept the media snug against the heads - critical because floppy media is based on contact with the head. Best way to think of this an S shaped that is on its side. The lobs are the two heads and the line drawing the S is the media. It is a very shallow bend for the media. Any other method would create a pinch effect that could be deadly of the coating. When the heads are unloaded, the media would float between them. Loading created the tension contour. A lot of work was done with air bearing type of read/write but it was not reliable enough to go into production. The media specs were too poor to give good snr with anything but contact recording. Contact recording was tried with hard drives a few times. These were the famous "tail draggers". None of them ever achieved reliable enough operation to survive long. Billy